Well, the laws of physics hold sway, after all, and the bigger guy with the bigger energy reserves easily outviolences Professor Mortis an her team – regardless of the great deal of practical experience that deal has with regards to the liberal application of excessive violence. You can’t beat physics!

Or at least that’s the interpretation I would prefer to explain the inevitability of this outcome. The alternative explanation involves the similarly unbending rules of script-writing, which include such things as the oft-mentioned principle of Chekov’s Gun. There would have been absolutely no purpose to let Latho offer its advice so often and at such length, and have it ignored by the heroes in the most explicit of ways, if that advice would have ultimately turned out to be wrong or irrelevant.

While Mopey is sometimes genre-savvy enough to avoid that kid of trap, that factor isn’t reliably in her favor – it depends on the need of the plot, naturally, and here the plot required her to step right into it. The trap, I mean, but I guess the sentence would work without that added specification in basically the same way. More, if not entirely, reliable is her ability to learn from her mistakes, and she does so immediately and with verve…well, with as much verve as once can muster after having been thrown through the air and then been trampled by a guy with an unspecified but supernaturally large amount of body mass. She is now, finally, willing to listen to the advice Latho had been unsuccessful in offering for so long. By hurting Mopey badly enough to bring her that far, the bad guy might very well have undermined his apparent victory…

More on Monday.